The Incomplete Tim Key. Tim Key

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      WOOING, SCREWING AND CHEWING

My father pulled my mum at a fancy dress party. He was dressed up as a schoolmaster and she was there as a pirate. One doesn’t like to rake over old ground but I imagine he probably spluttered some bon mot about piracy, got her giggling, engaged her in conversation, discussed his voluntary work as a scout leader and then possibly had her feel his beard. There would have been nothing smutty or improper. Because it was a different era! There then would have followed a respectful period of courting. My father would have bought or stolen flowers for my mother and she would have blushed and entered whichever restaurant or bingo hall my father had opened the door to and ushered her into. He would have been respectful, and ultimately he would marry and sleep with her. My mother. These days such exploits would be unheard of. These days people grab whoever’s nearest, get off with them, get their full name for Facebook purposes and hope that warmth and companionship will automatically follow. Young men and women just don’t have the patience to wait for a fancy dress party. Their heads have been contaminated by Page 3 and Skins and Richard Keys and pornographic websites, and they roam around in a daze, like zombies, banging into each other, falling on top of each other, humping each other, apologising to each other. It doesn’t do to overthink this sort of thing but I imagine part of the problem is the fact that the Church has had a difficult few decades, so they can’t make people act the right way like they used to be able to. So you’ve then got to ask why this has happened. How has the Church lost it? For my money, it’s in large part due to the fact that people have begun to find the sermons limited and unexciting, and so they’ve stopped putting their hands in their pockets during collections and so the Church haven’t had the brass to hire the sort of charismatic preachers that they would need in order to compete with more vibrant industries such as TV, sport and cinema. So we are left without any saintly guidance; we are content to chalk up sexual partners like they’re going out of fashion. Do we blame Tiger Woods for his dismal conduct? Hang him out to dry in our redtops? Damn him in our poetry anthologies? Or do we blame mean Christians for not putting more coins in the velvet bag? I know one man who’s screwed six girls called Claire Smith, and has his eye on a seventh. Thankfully, you do still get exceptions to this morally bankrupt norm. You can still find the odd square waddling up to his date with a bag of posies, pecking her on the cheek and steering her into a community organised dance, but largely things have become much more aggressive, immediate and grubby. Where possible, of course, I make a point of bucking this trend. I am always at pains to be as romantic as the situation allows. Recently, I cooked dinner for a young Spanish lady. She was very appreciative. I was ladling beans and spice-infused cress onto our plates like a man possessed – Norah Jones belting out of my Sony Hi-Fi as God intended. I had lit candles and joss sticks and hollowed out a pumpkin by way of effort and she was glowing in the face of my commitment to romance. It was quite a night! My only complaint was that she insisted on leaving in a taxi prior to pudding. Once she had left, I sat in front of the snooker and, reflecting on my evening, became deeply annoyed. It struck me that, having splashed out on flowers, dinner ingredients and a residential cooking course to get me to a sufficient standard to approximate Spanish cooking, I had in fact spent more than it would have cost me to hire exactly the type of professional sex worker I had been trying to avoid paying. And yet, owing to my old-fashioned, romantic obsessiveness, I didn’t even get to experience anything remotely intimate with Martina. Not a handshake, not nothing. In short, it was a fucking washout.